Partition Manager

[Zonie]

I know this has been discussed before but humor me. Have a laptop, (Dell Inspiron), which for some reason beyond my understanding has (2) partitions. C drive has a capacity of 40GB and the D drive is 260GB. The client has pictures and documents on the C drive which is filling up the partition. I don't want to teach them how to use the 2nd partition but rather incorporate the 2nd partition into the first making it all one drive. What are your suggestions for the best program to do this without loss of data.

TIA

[Ferrit]

What operating system?

[Guts3d]

If you can find a copy of Partition Magic 8, it will do it as long as it is XP or before. I would strongly suggest copying important data, as I had maybe 1 out of 2 dozen merges muck up and corrupt the partition. EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition works for a buddy of mine, and he swears it will work with Win 7, but since I haven't confirmed this I take it with a grain of salt.

[CeeBee]

Probably the best choice would be redirecting the folders to D and moving the data there.

[Zonie]

Duh, forgot the most impotant information. OS is Win 7.

[Ferrit]

The you dont need anything.
1:: Back up data
2: Right click my computer choose Manage.
2A: Left side, choose Disk Management
3: Choose the C drive and right click it.
It will offer options to expand it

[Zonie]

The you dont need anything.
1:: Back up data
2: Right click my computer choose Manage.
2A: Left side, choose Disk Management
3: Choose the C drive and right click it.
It will offer options to expand it

Thanks Ferrit, will give that a shot when I see them next week.

[Zonie]

Update, went to clients yesterday and tried the manage disk and under drive C: I can shrink but not extend. D: drive allows both, so I shrank the D: drive by 100GB and then went back to the C: Drive to extend the drive by the free space created. Again it was grayed out and would not allow it to be extended. It looks like I will have to backup everything, delete the partitions and start over with 1 partition.

[Ferrit]

Wait did you reboot after you shrank the d drive? I am not sure that it would help the greyed out problem but it may have needed it
Is something a little weird there but that's likely the best choice you have made. Its the safest and the best. Hope it goes good

[Zonie]

Thank you Ferrit, I am just hoping Murphy does not stop by for a visit.

[Platypus]

You'll also have to move the D: drive along to make room for C: to expand. A partition has to be in contiguous space. The D: drive will shrink from the end, so there will be free space after the end, which would enable creation of say an E: or F: drive. C: needs the unallocated space to be between it and the D: drive, so it can be expanded into that space.

[Zonie]

Thank you Platypus, but, since I have not done this before, how do you move the D: drive behind the new allocated space?

[Poseidon]

If you prefer not to use the DiskPart Utility included in Windows 7, then I would recomend Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional

It works well with Windows 7, (both 64 or 32bit), and is not dissimilar to Partition Magic 8 back in the day.

[Zonie]

Thank you for the info Poseidon.

[KinetiK]

Apologies if I misunderstand your desires, but if you don't want two partitions on the same physical disk why not take any important data off the D:\ partition then expand C:\ to occupy the entire disk?